After several minutes of almost perfect silence as he made his way around the second circuit in the 1973 Grand National, it was the unmistakable sound of Red Rum’s nostrils that told Richard Pitman he was in trouble. “It was fast ground that day,” Pitman, now 80, says. “You could hear the horses’ hooves, ‘drmmm drmmm, drmmm drmmm’ but Red Rum had flappy nostrils, so when he exhaled there would be a ‘pwwwrrr, pwwwrrr’ and I can still hear those sounds chasing me now. ‘Drmmm drmmm, pwwwrrr pwwwrr’.”
Anyone who is old enough to have watched the epic, breathtaking heroism of Crisp’s failure to win the 1973 Grand National as it happened, this writer included, is likely to have equally indelible memories of perhaps the most gripping piece of racing theatre to unfold at Aintree.
